High performance portable communication systems commonly employ some form of spreading sequence both as a security measure and to provide robustness against multipath fades. Although the despreading and data recovery mechanism in the receiver could be implemented using a high speed digital signal processing architecture, the required hardware would be impractical in terms of power required, size and weight. On the other hand, using strictly analog passive signal processing components, such as surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices, would require a complex matched filter design of prohibitive size, particularly where very long spreading sequences are used.